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2011年2月3日 星期四

哈維爾在哥大的日子

Vaclav Havel, former president of the Czech Republic, in Low Memorial Library at Columbia; his residency at the university ends on Friday.
Photo courtesy of Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times﹐Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Vaclav Who? Oh Yeah, the President Guy Who’s Reviving His Artistic Side By JULIE BOSMAN
Published: December 13, 2006 (New Times Times)

Vaclav Havel suspected he was not exactly a household name to the students at Columbia University when he began a residency there this fall.

After all, the average college freshman had barely learned to crawl in 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell and Mr. Havel was emerging on the international stage as the president of Czechoslovakia.

Gregory Mosher, the director of Columbia’s Arts Initiative, which brought Mr. Havel to the university, put it more bluntly. “They had no idea who he is,” Mr. Mosher said. “They heard the name and thought he was a hockey player.”

But as Mr. Havel’s seven-week residency nears its end, on Friday, this former dissident, political figure and playwright has successfully introduced himself to a group of students schooled in terrorism and 9/11, not communism and the Velvet Revolution. He has starred in lectures and discussions at Columbia, most notably with another member of what could be called the former presidents’club, Bill Clinton, whose Harlem offices are blocks away from campus.

And he has taken in the buzzy social life of New York, attending Broadway shows and cocktail parties, reluctantly declining invitations once his calendar was stretched to the limit. “I discovered that Americans don’t take it personally,”he said, sipping white wine during a recent interview on the Columbia campus. (Czechs do.)

His residency at Columbia was the product of intense lobbying by Lee C. Bollinger, the university president, who founded the Arts Initiative more than two years ago with the intent of luring people like Mr. Havel and Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish novelist and Nobel Prize winner who just completed his own fellowship at the university.

The program was intended to connect the campus to the larger culture. And a visit from Mr. Havel presented a special opportunity to educate the students, Mr. Mosher said. “I know in my gut that connecting the idea of an artist and a president or an artist and human rights hero is a novel idea,”he said.

These days Mr. Havel is leading the plummy life of a retired statesman working on reviving his artistic side. On Oct. 5 the Untitled Theater Company No. 61, in Manhattan, gave Mr. Havel a 70th birthday party that kicked off a two-month “Havel Festival”with productions of 16 of his plays, including one world premiere and five English-language premieres.

In May, Alfred A. Knopf will publish his memoir, “The Castle: Reflections on My Strange Life as a Fairy-Tale Hero,”most of which he wrote during a residency last fall at the Library of Congress in Washington. Mr. Havel said the book combined interviews, diary entries and memos from his presidential days.

If Mr. Havel is enjoying his time away from politics and closer to culture, it is long overdue. The years he spent as president of the Czech Republic, which was formed in 1993, left him with a permanent gap in his pop cultural knowledge, he said. “Unfortunately I have to acknowledge that there’s a big sort of delay, a big retardation in my development in recent years and one which I will never be able to catch up with because of those 13 years as president,”Mr. Havel said.

Mr. Havel is no longer the vibrant, rakish figure of his youth, as he appears on the cover of the forthcoming “Castle,”smiling and relaxed with cigarette in hand. At 70 he walks with a slight shuffle and sometimes breathes with difficulty, a reminder of his battle with lung cancer, for which he had surgery in 1996. He declined to talk about his current health.

Since the fall of the Iron Curtain, he said, he has not undergone any fundamental existential disappointments about the state of Europe and the world. “I myself am not a naïve utopian or a dreamer,”he said.

Though he was initially supportive of an invasion of Iraq, and was rewarded with a Medal of Freedom from President Bush in 2003, his book — published this year in the Czech Republic under the title “Briefly, Please”— will explain his belief that the war has become a “fiasco. When asked about his opinions of Mr. Bush now, Mr. Havel demurs. “I will just say that you have the president that you elected.”

European politics are another matter. Mr. Havel is more concerned about what he calls a rising tide of nationalism in countries like Hungary and Poland. And he believes strongly that Turkey should be allowed to join the European Union, despite its cultural differences with the West, he said.

“It’s not right to be leading Turkey on all these decades to feel that they are part of these Western structures and this Western community, he said, “And then now to start sort of backpedaling and say that they’re not good enough.”

One way for diverse cultures to coexist peacefully, Mr. Havel said, is to agree on what he calls a “moral minimum, or a set of basic rules of respect and equality common to all societies and cultures.

And as he sees it, Christianity has its own problems. “It has its own tradition of fundamentalism and a certain kind of terrorism,”he said. “It has its rather great, terrible historical examples of liquidating other civilizations.”

Writing a new play, based on “King Lear,”is Mr. Havel’s next undertaking. When he saw his old plays performed at the Untitled Theater Company over the last few months, Mr. Havel was surprised at how much more favorably he viewed certain of his plays, which he hadn’t liked very much when they were originally produced. A play “has within it a certain potential for meanings to kind of come to it that the author didn’t necessarily even have it in mind at first, he said. “A successful play is always cleverer than its author.”

Time Out, reviewing Mr. Havel’s play “Mountain Hotel,”was less positive. “Vaclav Havel should be thankful that his CV lists dissident, political prisoner and Czech president, the reviewer wrote. “Without it, his plays probably wouldn’t receive so much attention.”

In the spring Mr. Havel will go on the media circuit to promote “The Castle, appearing on C-Span and National Public Radio. Knopf promises a book heavy on politics, with Mr. Havel’s opinions on the war in Iraq and the future of the European Union.

The lighter side of the book may be the moments that reveal a fledgling democracy in the early 1990s. Mr. Havel chose to include in the book documents like memos chiding staff members about bad food, improper utensils at state dinners and “a whole array of things, which, of course, several years later seem entirely unimportant, Mr. Havel said. But, he continued, they “really illustrate very well what the everyday life of the presidency was in a post-Communist country, where we didn’t have any tradition to latch onto and really had to invent everything all over again.”

And “The Castle will be the only memoir of his political life that he writes, Mr. Havel said. “With this book I’ve sort of come to terms with the end of my presidency and this part of my career, and I don’t feel the need or desire to write any further memoirs as such,”he said. “Now I want to write a play.”